I am a critic and artist based in the United States and Europe. I'm most recently the author of Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age, published by Oxford University Press, and and have contributed criticism to dozens of publications ranging from Art in America to New Scientist. My conceptual art has been exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide.

8/24/2012 @ 12:49PM1,562 views

Can Pussy Riot Redeem Political Art?

Supporters of punk group Pussy Riot outside the Church of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow on August 15, 2012. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

In 1985, the Museum of Modern Art presented a ‘comprehensive’ exhibition of contemporary sculpture and painting in which more than 92 percent of the participants were men, provoking some female artists to stage a protest. Nobody paid them much attention. So the women donned gorilla masks and began to rally for gender equality anonymously, calling themselves the Guerrilla Girls, a group identity that made them collectively famous. From our present-day perspective, their agitprop theatrics would appear to be a dress rehearsal for the apotheosis of Pussy Riot. Yet for all the parallels – a conceptual debt Pussy Riot acknowledges – there is an essential difference. Whereas the Guerrilla Girls were picketing to be recognized for their art, Pussy Riot’s “punk prayer” for the end of the Putin era, staged inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, is a brilliant work of political art in its own right.

Political art has a bad reputation, and there are two good reasons to be wary of it: political and artistic. Activists fairly argue that most political art fails to reach an adequate audience to inspire real change. And connoisseurs legitimately claim that most political art sacrifices aesthetics for rhetoric.

Pussy Riot has avoided the first pitfall by performing outside the safety zone of a museum or concert hall, spaces where self-selecting audiences tend to be sympathetic to artists’ ideas before even entering the door, or able to frame fiery polemic as harmless entertainment. Invading Moscow’s holiest church, members of Pussy Riot lodged their prayer in front of a clergy that had made the church into a political entity by ensuring Putin’s ascent, and in front of the public that had the power to bring down Putin through their vote. In other words, performing inside the church was not merely provocative, but perfectly logical. The clergy had already desecrated the cathedral by making the Russian Orthodox Church into a secular power broker. The members of Pussy Riot were merely using the cathedral in accordance with this political role and, most ingeniously of all, appropriating prayer as a political act that really could work miracles by awakening an apathetic public.

How Pussy Riot performs is also important, seamlessly integrating rhetoric with aesthetics. Their masked anonymity reflects how Putin views the public – as an undifferentiated mass rather than as individuals with rights – while simultaneously demonstrating the revenge that a faceless public can take. Three women have been sent to prison, but Pussy Riot is not three members fewer. On the contrary, there are more masked rioters than before. The band’s slogan – “We are all Pussy Riot” – sounds more plausible every day, and since they all look alike, their numbers appear infinite. Putin’s vision of leadership is recast as an autocrat’s worst nightmare.

Though often used in political protest, anonymity is uncommon in modern art, which is valued for uniqueness, a byproduct of artists’ individuality. In that respect, Pussy Riot’s performance bears less resemblance to contemporary work than to old church iconography, which proliferated as if by magic. Pussy Riot’s output is likewise irrepressible. The political art of the future will be anonymous and emergent.

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Pussy Riot are named after an action when a riot of live cats, which they’s collected were thrown at fast food workers in a burger restaurant. If that is art, it belongs in prison. Attacking people because they have lowly jobs is a filthy loathsome activity.